Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Is Obamacare a Political Registration and Data Collection Tool?

A few weeks back we wrote about Obamacare registering
people to vote. Now others are talking about it, even saying it is a reason for
Democrats
pushing Obamacare.

“The practice raises
longstanding suspicions on the right that the ACA exchanges are designed for
political as well as regulatory purposes," said Tim Miller, a senior
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Conservative talk show host
Rush Limbaugh has been characteristically blunt on the subject. "The
purpose of Obamacare got nothing to do with your health, and nothing to do with
your insurance," he said. "It's about building a permanent,
undefeatable, always-funded Democrat majority."

We have seen that Obamacare is, at a minimum,
incompetently run in the last few weeks. The concept that that effort also is registering
voters is frightening. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has
refused to even discuss the issue.

In Washington, Rep. Charles
Boustany, R-La., sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen
Sebelius in March, expressing concerns about the linking of ACA insurance
applications to voter registration.

"While the health care
law requires that government agencies collect vast information about Americans'
personal lives, it does not give your Department an interest in whether
individual Americans choose to vote," he wrote.

Obamacare's failures to even launch a website
successfully is due in part to all the information that it is trying to
collect. The fact that part of that effort is to register people with all that
information should be of concern to all Americans.